How Shopify brought the Club Brugge fan experience to life and boosted printed shirt sales 25%
Previous Platform
Lightspeed
Industry
Sports
Use Case
Growth and scale
Product
Partner
Radikal, HumanEyes, Bits of Love, Twikey Payments
Founded in 1891, Club Brugge is one of the most decorated football teams in Belgium. It has a passionate fan base, and uses Shopify Plus to enhance the fan experience with its official online club shop.
Since moving to Shopify Plus, the brand has seen:
- Increase in sales of printed shirts by 25%
- 77% checkout conversion rate on mobile
- 7.33% conversion rate of total website entrances on desktop (total 4.53%)
Challenge
An official store is one of the key ways football clubs can make supporters feel like part of the team. But before migrating to Shopify Plus, Club Brugge’s fan shop relied on Lightspeed’s platform and pre-made templates, making it difficult to feel like you were shopping at the club. You could add colours and logos, sure, but the ecommerce team couldn’t fully integrate the club branding into the site.
As well as struggling with limited design options, the club was regularly hitting an API request bottleneck for its printed shirt builder, which was a particular headache for Club Brugge as personalised orders often spike with the signing of a new star player.
When you launch a new shirt, you want to be able to sell thousands within hours. If you can only personalise 60 an hour, you can only disappoint your loyal fanbase and lose a tremendous amount of sales.
- Club Brugge
- Gauthier Vervaeke — Merchandise & Ecommerce Manager
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Solution
After looking into different options for new ecommerce platforms, Club Brugge chose Shopify Plus for its easy set-up, customization capabilities and best-in-class UX experience. Shopify’s big presence in Europe was also a draw as it meant more support would be locally available for Club Brugge. It partnered up with the Antwerp based Shopify agency Radikal who, with its vast experience and strategic strength provided an immense help to build a fan tailored Shopify club store.
As 72% of traffic to Club Brugge’s fan shop was mobile, having a mobile-first design was essential too; it teamed up with UX specialists at HumanEyes to make the mobile store incredibly user-friendly and the whole shopping experience better for fans.
The site now even has a gift finder feature to make it easier for friends and family of fans to buy the right products from the official store. They can filter products by different parameters, meaning that even if they themself have no knowledge of the team, they can still find the perfect gift for the Blauw-Zwart fan in their lives.
Now we have a very nice looking online store on desktop, but also on mobile. Football team branding is very important and you want to recreate the atmosphere of a game at every step of the customer journey.
- Club Brugge
- Gauthier Vervaeke — Merchandise & Ecommerce Manager
Results
The move to mobile-first design has seen a 15% increase in mobile conversion rate, growing to 3.71% overall. Alongside this, the Shopify app store has enabled Club Brugge to bring the fan experience to life in a way it couldn’t before.
The feature that really made the difference was the custom shirt builder which has improved print shirt sales by 25%. The checkout process is also smoother and Club Brugge now has an average checkout conversion rate of 77% on all devices.
The custom shirt builder is on every possible touchpoint throughout the game shirt journey, it’s on the homepage, has a separate landing page and it's also included on the product detail page of every game kit. This way, the fan can personalise their shirt wherever they want and it works really well. It's very easy and very fast on mobile and desktop.
- Club Brugge
- Gauthier Vervaeke — Merchandise & Ecommerce Manager
But Club Brugge have continued to expand their ambitions and integrate their club-wide offering through tokenization too. With Shopify Plus and club partner Twikey, fans can even use their Club ID - a card used inside the stadium to buy drinks, snacks and merchandise - to pay at the online store too.
This enables fans to get more out of the money loaded onto their Club ID, and also joins up in the in-person and online fan experience.
We started Cotopaxi with Shopify from day one. As a founder of two previous ecommerce businesses, I knew how expensive it was to build our own website, so when I learned of Shopify in 2013, it was a no-brainer. Having a platform that we could just plug into and that scaled with us over time was a game-changer. It allowed us to invest the money we would have spent developing a website into our impact work.
- Club Brugge
- Gauthier Vervaeke — Merchandise & Ecommerce Manager